Carbonophosphates: A New Family of Cathode Materials for Li-Ion Batteries Identified Computationally

The tremendous growth of Li-ion batteries into a wide variety of applications is setting new requirements in terms of cost, energy density, safety, and power density. One route toward meeting these objectives consists in finding alternative chemistries to current cathode materials. In this Article, we describe a new class of materials discovered through a novel high-throughput ab initio computational approach and which can intercalate lithium reversibly. We report on the synthesis, characterization, and electrochemical testing of this novel lithium-carbonophosphate chemistry. This work demonstrates how the novel high-throughput computing approach can identify promising chemistries for next-generation cathode materials.